ABSTRACT
Critical events trigger the most intense consideration of security, identity, and legitimacy. Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and more recently the 9/11 attacks were each catalysts for reflection and reaction concerning national and personal security, who ‘we’ are and what ‘our’ values are, and what security policies would be a legitimate and efficacious response to the situation as understood. Following the launch of the 2003 Iraq War, the UK then appeared to be beset with critical security events, each brought to citizens by media but which also directly affected many people’s lives. Here, our focus falls upon the 7/7 London bombings of July 2005, the Forest Gate police raids on homes in June 2006, and the transatlantic air plot that paralysed Heathrow airport in August 2006. All involved apparently ‘radicalised’ individuals who committed or were believed to be about to commit violence. These events were part of a series of international attacks or counterterrorism responses presumed to constitute and lend narrative coherence to the ‘Global War on Terror’ and discourses of global fear, risk and resilience. Such incidents are crucial test cases for the assertion that radicalisation lies at a nexus of global Jihadist discourses and local security concerns, since we might expect to see the motives and background of Jihadist perpetrators made visible by mainstream media for audiences to understand who is carrying out the attacks being reported. If there is a nexus through which Jihadist discourses cascade from the Jihadist online world and translate through reporters and analysts into mainstream public understandings, it is through breaking terrorism events that such connections might occur. This chapter explains why mainstream television coverage of breaking news events connected to terrorism and radicalisation took on a certain consistent form and content. Edward Said noted the pun in the title of his book Covering Islam (1981). His analysis of Western media coverage of Islam and Muslims suggested such reporting obscured or covered as much as it made clear. We suggest media coverage is more than a matter of obscuring/revealing: media construct particular forms and audience relations to such forms, in order to create imperatives to keep watching. We must investigate such forms to begin to identify how audience understanding, concern and perhaps anxiety or insecurity might be generated. We find that, first, the form these events took in media were shaped by the representation of a certain temporality. These media events offered an ‘event
time’ (Gitlin 1980) characterised as an extended present (Nowotny 1994). The past and the future were represented as extensions of the ongoing crisis, the breaking news moment. The future was presented as an empty space or plane upon which the implications of the event would unfold, and the past was interpreted for ‘signs’ of danger leading to the present crisis. As news, the extended present created an imperative to keep watching and following the story. As news about terrorism, this format offered a representation of a future foreshadowed by the threat of similar or greater attacks to come. However, in addition to the extended present, television news presented the viewer with news they had already seen. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the BBC offered regular drama-documentaries or simulations of security crises, with a programme each on a smallpox epidemic, transport catastrophe and terrorist attacks on London. Each of these ‘premediations’ was used to prepare citizens – and any policymakers, journalists and emergency response workers watching – for how a real crisis might unfold. Indeed, the ‘London under attack’ terrorist simulation featured the very ‘experts’ who were used for reporting actual terrorist incidents in the years to come, resulting in a merging of real and fictional representations. If the form of television coverage suggested a particular orientation to the past, present and future, the content of the coverage was shaped by discourses of security prevalent among security analysts, practitioners and academic analyses since the 1990s. A discourse is a set of practices through which certain statements count as meaningful. Hence a discourse ‘constrains and enables what can be said’ (Barad 2007: 147). We examine how analyses of security and terrorism created discourses in which certain descriptions of terrorists, governments, citizens and fear are presented as meaningful and valid. The ‘global risk’ analysis of Ulrich Beck presents a world of contagious threats generated by human activity but now beyond human control, requiring a fundamental shift in the arrangement of world politics. A parallel ‘global fear’ analysis produced by scholars as well as journalists and some policymakers suggests we have entered a ‘post9/11’ era, a distinct, dangerous new period, in which anxiety about threats is universal. Finally, television news coverage of breaking terrorist events is marked by a ‘resilience’ discourse, in which is it is assumed that public authorities need to instil resilience in citizens so that they are less vulnerable to mass panic or residual anxiety in the face of global risks and fears. Journalists and officials appearing in media coverage in the 2004-2006 period largely operated within these discursive parameters of risk, fear and resilience. Such discourses reinforced the temporal formats of the extended present and premediation, resulting in the projection of an understanding of the present and future as a ‘war without end’, thereby reinforcing – inadvertently – the ‘war on terror’ framework of the US and UK governments of the time. Jihadists are largely absent from mainstream media, however. Breaking news events around radicalised violence are marked by an absence of information. Either officials do have information but are slow to release it, or authorities have acted on the precautionary principle and do not have any confirmed information, having acted in response to an imagined or presumed threat to which the
consequences of not responding would be more catastrophic than taking wrong action. This creates a space for speculation about threats in general, and attempts to connect general theories to scraps of information about these particular events. We find the discourses of risk, fear and resilience shape what is said and how the events are conceived. Hence, the chapter identifies the nexus of discourses that enable radicalisation to be framed as a significant problem. After establishing the centrality of mainstream television to audience-cumcitizens’ engagement with breaking security events, this chapter offers analysis of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, June 2006 Forest Gate police raids, and August 2006 Heathrow transatlantic bomb plot arrests.
